Running traditional routing protocols in a dense topology (e.g. CLOS) with a large number of switches interconnected in a bipartite manner does not scale adequately. For example, if we consider a 2-level folded-CLOS topology with a level-1 PoD consisting of ten (10) spines and five hundred (500) fabric edge switches (ToRs) and then each level-1 pod interconnected in a fully bipartite manner to ten (10) level-2 spines, a traditional interior gateway protocol (“IGP”) will not scale and convergence will be poor in cases of network failures. In another example of this difficulty, consider a single layer PoD with 10 level-1 spines and 500 ToRs, where each ToR is connected to each spine. A spine failure occurs at this point. Each of the 500 ToRs will notice that a link which was previously up has gone down. This will initiate a Link State Packet (LSP) to indicate this transition in topology. Each of the surviving spines will receive these LSPs from each ToR. Thus, each of 9 spines receives 500 LSPs. These LSPs are then forwarded to the ToRs. Each ToR will in turn forward the LSP it receives from one spine to all the other 8 spines from which it might not have received the latest copy of the LSP. Depending on spine load and other factors such as how fast the other spine is or how long the LSP queue is, one spine might receive (500*500) or 250,000 LSPs. This puts a tremendous burden upon the capability of each spine node.